He encouraged young people to rebel against authority figures-not including himself-and in doing so incited China’s youth into a violent class struggle. Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China, launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in order to purge what remained of capitalist values and traditional practices in Chinese culture.

Much of Do Not Say We Have Nothing centers on exploring the effects that China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s had on individuals and communities. Thien is partnered to the Lebanese Canadian writer Rawi Hage and teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is her most successful novel to date, and it was published in 2016 to widespread critical acclaim. When she left, she published an essay about Hong Kong’s restrictions on freedom of speech and the abrupt dissolution of the creative writing program. From 2010 to 2015, she taught in the Creative Writing department at City University of Hong Kong. She published Certainty, her first novel, in 2006, which is about her father’s experience growing up in Japanese-occupied Malaysia. Her debut collection treats the themes of intercultural relationships and intergenerational dynamics within families, both of which occur as themes in Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Still, in 1999 Thien won the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop’s Emerging Writers Award for her short story collection, Simple Recipes. She claims to have felt she was not talented enough to pursue writing as a career at a younger age. She then went on to earn a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Before dedicating herself to creative writing, she studied contemporary dance in college. Madeleine Thein was born in British Columbia to a Hong Kong Chinese mother and a Malaysian father.

Do not say we have nothing